Rensselaer County's sheriff's office is in turmoil from top to bottom.

THE STAKES:

County residents need complete faith in this law enforcement agency.

The pile of dirty laundry in the Rensselaer County Sheriff's Office has grown so deep and so tangled that it's no longer a mess than can be sorted and cleaned in-house.

Alleged invasions of privacy, violations of federal law, conspiracies to destroy records, workplace violence, discrimination and retaliation — and those were just the last few weeks' headlines. Look back to last year and there's yet more, from attempts to influence inmate votes to theft of union dues. The accusations stretch from the rank and file to Sheriff Jack Mahar himself.

Some of this the civil courts may end up sorting out in personal lawsuits. But the bigger questions of misconduct and corruption, high and low, demand an investigation by an entity with unquestioned independence, clout, expertise and breadth. The Rensselaer County District Attorney's Office is too close politically to the matter, and the state Commission on Correction, which deals with local jails, has too narrow a scope, not to mention questions about its own competence.

The County Legislature should either ask the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office to expand their current probe of misconduct by jail officers, or request the state attorney general to step in.

There's a full plate for whoever takes this on.

There's last year's allegations that jail officers tried to influence the sheriff's election by persuading inmates to vote for Mr. Mahar's opponent, Democrat Gary Gordon. That, and claims that former labor leaders took union dues for personal use, are already under federal investigation.

More recently, jail personnel have come under scrutiny by the sheriff's office and by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for allegedly accessing medical records of both correction officers and private individuals, which would violate federal health privacy law.

Separately, the fired chief of corrections at the jail — who was brought in to help clean up misconduct in the facility — accused Mr. Mahar of trying to get her to destroy documents related to complaints of workplace violence filed by a correction officer. The former chief, Ruth Vibert, says she was also pressured to either help get the officer fired or prevent him from being promoted.

And most recently, Lt. James Karam, the sheriff's head of internal affairs — the one who's supposed to keep the rest of the department on the straight and narrow — alleged that Mr. Mahar is blocking his request for disability and that he's been subjected to derogatory statements at work regarding his Arab ancestry.

In short, the scandals touch every level of the department, from non-sworn civilians to rank-and-file officers to the internal watchdog to the union to the management and to the elected official in charge of it all. This department needs an outside investigation — outside all the competing self-interests within the office, and outside the politics of Rensselaer County.

This isn't just another county agency with some water cooler issues. It's a law-enforcement agency. The county's citizens deserve nothing less than law and order from those whom they've entrusted to provide it.